Carry On: Everything's the Same but They're in High School
by K3rr13
Summary: Half the time Simon can't even play the simplest songs, his mentor's avoiding him, his girlfriend broke up with him, and there's ghost running around the school taking people's music, pretending to be him. Baz would be having a field day with all this, if he were here-it's their last year at the Watford School of Music and Simon's infuriating nemesis didn't even bother to show up.


Simon

Every year, leaving my foster home for school is a whole ordeal. We start the week with me mentioning my scholarship to Watford, the single most prestigious art school for high school kids. After that, it's a manner of me being either a perfect angel or a horrible child so that they let/want me to go. The past few years it's been easy, my foster family is really only in it for the money so having one less mouth to feed while I'm off at school is a blessing for them. The first year, the principle of the school, Mr. Salisbury came to my door and announced I'd earned the scholarship, despite never applying, and that he'd be taking me to the school. After that he always made me do it on my own, "_You're in high school now, Simon. Surely you can manage a long walk and a few buses."_

I get to the bus station, then eat a Chocolate Brownie Cliff Bar while I wait for my bus.

Once I'm settled in a seat, I try to sleep, legs spread over both the seats on my side of the aisle-but a man a few rows back won't stop watching me. I feel his eyes crawling up my neck.

I figure it's some pervert so I sit myself up and don't bother trying to sleep again. The closer I get to Watford, the more restless I feel. Every year, I spend the whole bus ride wishing I could somehow enchant the wheels or maybe time to go faster.

My mind wandered back to my teachers, specifically my music teacher, constantly telling me I need to practice more often over the summer. I hadn't bothered telling her that doing that would likely piss off my foster parents more than I can afford.

It's kind of pointless for me, anyway. I kinda suck at music.

Nobody really knows why I can't make my music carry any emotion. Why it feels like a huge slap in the face instead of some kind of caress or whatever it is everyone else says it feels like.

"I don't know," Penelope said when I asked her how music feels for her. "I suppose it feels like a well inside me. And when I play it's just there for me to draw from, as long as I stay focused."

Penelope always stays focused. Plus she's just good at what she does.

Agatha isn't. Not as, anyway. And Agatha doesn't like to talk about music.

But once, at Christmas, I kept Agatha up until she was tired and stupid, and she told me that music for her was like flexing a muscle and keeping it flexed. "Like _croisé devant_," she said. "You know?"

I shook my head

She was lying on a wolfskin rug in front of the fire, all curled up like a pretty kitten. "It's ballet," she said. "It's like I just hold position as long as I can."

Baz told me that for him, it's like lighting a match. Or pulling a trigger.

He hadn't meant to tell me that. We had accidentally gotten in with a group that bet if we didn't play through the first fifty measures of _24 Caprices_ then they'd hand us upside down naked from the tree in the front lawn. Baz was getting frustrated because there wasn't a single group of ten measures he could play on his own and he was yelling at me to get it right. (Not even _Mr. Salisbury_, could have done this alone.)

"Just fucking do it, Snow!"

"I can't," I tried to tell him. "It doesn't work like that."

"It bloody well does."

"I can't just get it right on command," I said.

"_Try._"

"I _can't_, damn it." I was waving my bow to what I thought the rhythm might be-even at 15 I was pretty good with rhythms-but the song wasn't really one you could count out, you had to feel it.

"Close your eyes and light a match," Baz told me. We were both trying to ignore the fact that the clock was ticking down. Baz was trying to sing the song.

"What?"

"That's what my mother used to say," he said. "Light a match inside your heart, then blow on the tinder."

It's always fire with Baz. I can't believe he hasn't incinerated me yet. Or burned me at the stake.

He used to like to threaten me with a Viking's funeral, back when we were Sophomores. "Do you know what that is, Snow? A flaming pyre set adrift on the sea. We could do yours in the Mississippi, so all your friends in the orphanage can come."

"Fuck off," I'd say, and try to ignore him.

Orphanages weren't even a thing anymore, and I'd never had friends anyway.

That night we were trying to avoid public humiliation Baz just kept yelling at me until some part of me took over and played the whole song perfectly.

We got knocked out anyway; we woke up a few hours later in the middle of the woods behind the school.

Baz was sure they'd shaved off his eyebrows, but he looked fine to me-not a hair out of place.

Typical.


End file.
